While many other systems have gone wireless, the majority of healthcare and fitness monitoring system remain wired today. A typical wired healthcare system is shown in FIG. 1. The system shown in FIG. 1 can be used to monitor a variety of physiological parameters such as electrocardiogram (ECG), electroencephalogram (EEG), electromyogram (EMG), blood glucose, blood pressure, heart rate, blood oxygen saturation (SpO2), hydration, air flow, pressure, acceleration and temperature. In the system shown, the sensors are placed on the subject's body to measure the desired physiological parameters. These sensors are connected to an anchor medical device which is called the host in the system. The host device can be any healthcare related device such as a bedside patient monitor, holster monitor, glucose meter, EEG system, blood pressure monitor, and/or a mobile health monitor. The host can be a stationary platform, a portable device or a mobile device. As shown, the wired sensor system typically feeds the data to the host via a wired host bus. The type of host bus is defined during the initial design of the healthcare system.
The tethering of patients to healthcare systems creates many problems today. The leads connected to sensors are reused among various patients often causing infection, leading to even death in many cases. Wires also come in the way of clinicians and caretakers resulting in lower productivity, poorer quality of care and lower reliability as wires frequently come off. Furthermore, tethering is a major discomfort for patients, particularly when extended monitoring is involved. Due to these and many other reasons, it would be desirable to make healthcare monitoring systems totally wireless, thereby untethering patients from host systems.
There is a large installed base of a variety of host systems with tethered sensors—bedside patient monitors in hospitals and clinics; portable host devices for ambulatory monitoring (such as holter monitors). It is highly desirable to retrofit these legacy systems for wireless monitoring. For wireless monitoring to be widespread, the retrofitted wireless scheme must be able to compete with the wired systems in every way. The wireless link must be as reliable as a wire. The wireless sensors attached to the body must be ultra low cost, must dissipate very low power for multi day operation, and must be physically small and disposable. Furthermore, the wireless adaptor plugged into host system must be compact, low power, and low cost.
There have been recent attempts to create wireless systems some of which have been introduced in the market. However, all these systems have wireless sensors, host systems and adaptors which are bulky, high power, expensive and have questionable reliability. It makes them unsuitable to compete with wired solutions for large scale deployment. The invention described herein proposes a scheme to retrofit the existing wired systems for wireless operation based on integrated semiconductor solutions with attributes to compete with today's wired systems to meet the mass market needs. The proposed scheme transforms the wired system as shown in FIG. 1 to a wireless system in a transparent manner and without an impact on the core infrastructure of the system, including the host's hardware or software, also known as retrofitting.